She didn’t know, but finally her American soldier had made his way to her father’s door. ‘I’ll marry her the very hour they let her go,’ he promised, when he learned where Bess had landed.
‘Bess,’ Sister Mary Declan cried. She slapped one cheek, then another, not in anger but genuine fear. Sister Mary Clare looked on, clutching her crucifix. It was important to all the nuns, to believe anyone who called them angels. By evening they would already be offering each other forgiveness, running down the rosary. Naming their sins and flinging them aside, ready to commit more tomorrow.
There was no time for hospital, or even to bring her downstairs to the mattress by the laundry. Susanna and Sister Mary Declan helped Bess deliver as best they could, right there in the dormitory. By the following morning Bess had finally clawed her way to the surface of the water, alive and whole. A miracle.
Another miracle: that same morning her young man appeared on the doorstep of the convent, demanding to see the Mother Superior. In time to walk Bess out of the convent, but too late for their baby boy. Little Ronan was one of the few babies who left the convent in Sunday’s Corner in his mother’s arms, swaddled in a yellow blanket: perfect and round-faced and stone-cold dead.
The Disappearance
Day Six
Thursday, 9 December 1926
THE BERKSHIRE BLOODHOUNDS weren’t doing the job any better than Agatha’s dog had done. Deputy Chief Constable Thompson called in a woman from Belgium whose dogs were said to be the best in Europe. These expert hounds followed Agatha’s scent in circles, concentrating on the spot where Finbarr had flagged her down, where she’d stepped out of the car, lavender beads of sweat plopping to the earth. The scent ended where it began, as she’d hopped into poor Miss Oliver’s car and sped away. The dogs sniffed and bayed uselessly, finally catching a whiff of a rabbit and leading the searchers on another fruitless chase. Even expert dogs are, in the end, dogs.
‘Agatha, Agatha,’ Archie moaned, taking turns about Styles, the house and its grounds. He found Teddy’s hoop, abandoned under a bush at the edge of the property, and gave it a spin. It rolled a few feet, teetered and fell sideways on the grass. He didn’t join the searches, not only to avoid his neighbours’ suspicious glances, but also because searching seemed to be an admission that there was something to be found – another body, this time Agatha’s – and he refused to consider that possibility. She was alive. It would be one of the policemen from an unlikely county to notify them and deliver the happy news: she’d been found, whole and well and ready to come home.
Noel Owen came round to keep him company. They drank late into the evening and took dinner in the sitting room.
‘Back when it first began with Nan,’ Archie confided, ‘it was all so new and exciting. A kind of newness and excitement I believed gone from my life. And I won’t lie, the forbidden nature of it, it was all so – so—’
‘Irresistible?’ Noel was not above prurient interest, though as far as I know he was always true to Ursula, to the extent any man can be.
Oh! The cynicism of that remark. To the extent any man can be. It doesn’t bear out the way I feel, and what I believe, deep down in my heart. Some men can be true to the greatest extent. Finbarr, for example. He was always true to me, and always would have been, if ever we’d been given our natural chance to be together. If the world had unfolded on its own, without wars and churches. What laughter there would have been. What joy. Dogs and books and children of our own, starting with our eldest, our own darling Genevieve, whom I’d secretly hold in my heart as my favourite, though I’d never let the other children know.
‘Irresistible,’ Archie agreed with Noel Owen, tasting the word as if it were a kind of poison. ‘The things I told myself. About Nan. About my marriage. If I’d been able to look ahead and see this moment, I believe I would have acted differently. I do believe that, Noel.’
Noel had been Archie’s friend a long while, and never had he seen him so full of doubts. ‘You can’t have known Agatha would react this way.’ He stood up to pour Archie some more whisky. ‘Men leave their wives every day, don’t they, without all this wretchedness. Agatha always seemed to have such a good head on her shoulders.’